Abstract
Earth internal seepage erosion in weathered bedrock under infrequently used hydraulic structures is often overlooked, which causes some solid particles to break away from the solid skeleton, degrading the earth’s strength, and even causing unanticipated hydraulic engineering failures. The flood on the Oroville dam spillway in California in 2017 was caused by disturbed water flow due to a crack in the spillway chute caused by internal erosion in poorly weathered bedrock. The abnormal water flow of the spillway in the early stage and subsequent investigation revealed that the main reason for the accident was the insufficient weathered bedrock under the spillway chute. In this study, we formulated a coupled hydro-mechanical mechanism for internal erosion in weathered bedrock during the early stages. Using this model, we conducted an internal erosion numerical simulation at early stage, and the results showed that the physical characteristics of the weathered bedrock were degraded. Our results show the coupling analysis of quantitative computation during the early stage of internal erosion in weathered bedrock, which can provide an early warning method for the occurrence of internal erosion to avoid hydraulic disasters.
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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in it and available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The base material and data are supplied by the California Department of Water Resources, available for download at (show website).
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This work was supported by the Key R&D and promotion projects in Henan Province (technical research) (No. 202102310018).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Xingsheng Zhang, Chaoyue Wang, and Xing Chen mainly developed the geotechnical numerical model and performed numerical analyses. Jinyu Dong, Mengke Hu, and Shipeng Liu gathered in situ data for the geotechnical numerical model. All authors reviewed and revised the manuscript.
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Zhang, X., Wang, C., Chen, X. et al. Insights into the cause of the Oroville dam spillway failure, 2017, California. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 21356–21369 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32462-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32462-3